containment - confinement - circumscription: a 12-hour durational performance by Natalie Loveless, Dillon Paul, David Buuck :: August 18, 2007, 12:00 pm - 12:00 am :: Studio Soto, 63 Melcher St. Boston, MA 02210 :: 617-426-7686 :: admission free : donations accepted.

Natalie Loveless, Dillon Paul, and David Buuck will create simultaneous durational performances using the concept of containment - confinement - circumscription as a conceptual framework. Performing for a duration of 12 hours, they will be wrapped, trapped, and disciplined, both literally and figuratively, grappling with the physical, social, institutional, psychological and political implications of their conditions, as well as searching for points of friction and resistance.

Natalie Loveless will perform the third in a trilogy of wrapping pieces, a twelve-hour durational exploration using invisible thread. In this performance, Loveless explores the transparent as both an active physical material and a conceptual agent. Like an ideology, like the unconscious, the invisible moves us. Both aesthetic and political, this durational action explores the force of the innocuously transparent as a mode of active opposition.

Dillon Paul will perform Capture #3, a solo performance inside an enclosed wooden box. The structure of the work conjures images of imprisonment and isolation, while the private viewing mechanism evokes a peephole or one-way observation room. In a suspenseful cat and mouse game, the viewers are enticed to “capture” the performance using a digital camera, acknowledging that, like Schroedinger´s Cat, the audience is implicated in the possibility that their observation inherently changes that which it observes.

David Buuck will perform actions from The Treatment, an ongoing performative writing project. In this iteration, the mundane work of the writer confronts the durational experience of the writing / thinking / performing body within the institutional spaces of the cubicle, and the broader “white cube” of the gallery, or the living-book. Reading and writing thus become public acts of presence, tuned to the charged sites of the social.

Natalie Loveless received an MFA in interdisciplinary studio from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2004, and an MA in Art History from Tufts University, also in 2004. She is currently working on a PhD in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz on trans-disciplinarity and its implications for new models of pedagogy and socially engaged art practices. Since 2003, her work has included conversation-based installation, social intervention work, and more traditional forms of durational action-art. She has exhibited and performed both locally and abroad in Europe, North and South America, and Asia.

Dillon Paul is a media and performing artist whose work engages all of the senses through movement, video and installation. Her work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at venues including the ODC Theatre (San Francisco, CA); Worth Ryder Gallery (Berkeley, CA); Mobius ( Boston, MA); Cleveland Performance Art Festival (Cleveland, OH); Dance Hakushu (Hakushu, Japan); Plan B (Tokyo, Japan); and the Kwangju Biennale (Kwangju, Korea). Paul received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2003) and is currently pursuing a Masters in Art Education from NYU (2008).

David Buuck is a writer who lives in Oakland, California, where he edits TRIPWIRE & runs BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. He has performed in San Francisco, Vancouver, Washington, DC, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Santa Cruz, and elsewhere.